


“Dané Cashillé, Sixth Handmaiden in the Second Class for Padmé Amidala”

by Polgarawolf



Series: Star Wars: You Became to Me [28]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: F/F, F/M, Handmaidens, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Politics, Sacrificial ethics, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-28
Updated: 2007-10-28
Packaged: 2017-11-13 09:02:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/501766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polgarawolf/pseuds/Polgarawolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is twenty-five random but essentially chronological moments from the life of Dané Cashillé, who is, quite literally, the sixth handmaiden in the second training class of potential handmaidens chosen from among a large pool of applicants for the job for the newly elected Nabooian Queen Padmé Amidala. There is an actual story here – one small thread among the vast woven tapestry of life that is the living history of the galaxy, stretched out and twisted, knotted into the whole, curled down among the roots of time, connecting various moments together – but one must read between the lines to capture it. It is not precisely the truth, for the subtle story of these moments is sketched out here in words, and, in the sin of writing down a life, it inevitably changes the shape of things. But it is nevertheless a form of truth. (From a certain point of view . . . )</p>
            </blockquote>





	“Dané Cashillé, Sixth Handmaiden in the Second Class for Padmé Amidala”

**Author's Note:**

> **Warning:** This story functions as a sort of compressed codex for Dané Cashillé’s life, as she is going to be written (or at least referred to) in my not even nearly complete AU **Star Wars** series **_You Became to Me_**. If anything doesn’t make sense, please feel free to ask!
> 
>  **Author’s Notes: 1.)** Again, this is compatible with my SW AU series **_You Became to Me_** , including my _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ trio, if you squint at a couple of things sideways and view a few others solely through the lens of Dané Cashillé’s eyes. **2.)** Although this is technically modeled on a prompt set that I borrowed from somewhere on the LJ (I don’t recall from where anymore, though if someone would like to set the record straight, I’ll add the info for the community in question here in my notes), it’s not really meant to function as a response to the challenge associated with that set. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Dané. **3.)** Readers might want to consider the fact that Dané, like a lot of native Nabooians, is fairly strong in the Force, but that she hasn’t received any training whatsoever to speak of and so has no real conscious control over that sensitivity to the Force. **4.)** Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for EU characters like Dané should please consult the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and for handmaid(en)s and other important Nabooian characters, which are available on my LJ! For clarity’s sake, though, Yané’s little brother, Constanoin, should be pictured as a young (about eleven and a half, at the time of his death) Jason Dohring. Versé Rhisiart, as a canon/EU handmaiden I’ve placed in the fourth class of handmaidens for Queen Amidala, has a specific physical model dictated (in a way) by _Attack of the Clones_ , as explained on my list of casting choices for handmaidens and the short story I’ve previously written for Versé and Cordé. Also, Ansia Rhisiart can be pictured as an approximately sixteen-year-old Paz Vega. Please note that characters who may be alluded to but not referenced by name are considered too minor to be cast at this time, and readers should feel free to imagine them howsoever they wish! **5.)** Handmaidens tend to pair off, as is the case here, with Dané Cashillé and Shelanné Glenn (hence, the relationship label for original female characters and the underage warning). **6.)** Speaking of pairings, I've labeled this to indicate both Padmé Amidala's and Sabé's love for Obi-Wan, because, even though such things may not be specifically mentioned in this character study piece, handmaid(en)s know so much about their sworn Lady that Dané, like all of Amidala's other handmaid(en)s who knew him (or knew of him), would have surely known about both their Lady's and Sabé's love and high regard for Obi-Wan, just as they would have known about how much Amidala and Sabé love one another! **7.)** Readers should please keep in mind that words that appear Gaelic in nature or else modelled on Gaelic terms are meant as place-holders for non-Basic words (in this case, Nabooian). If anything doesn't make sense in context, please just ask, and I'll send an English approximation for the word/term!
> 
>  **Story Notes:** **1.)** Since this is part of a larger on-going AU series that in some respects fairly closely mirrors or follows events of canon (up to a certain point, anyway), readers should please keep in mind that certain characters and events from the prequel movies/novelizations of the films and even events/places/people referenced in the EU or Expanded Universe may be mentioned or alluded to in this story. If anyone has any questions about whether someone or something is AU, canon, or EU canon, please feel free to ask! **2.)** Readers should probably be aware that I am roughly estimating (guestimating might be a better word) the original publication date for most of the character study pieces in the **_You Became to Me_** series (and indeed most of my stories, especially the ones written over a long period of time), based on when I roughed out notes for them in the story notebooks I carry everywhere with me and when I can recall having worked on certain groups of characters. The year is going to be accurate, but the month might be off and the day will almost certainly be randomly chosen, since the online account I had originally posted many of these stories to no longer exists. I tend to go back and edit things that are in series whenever I get the time or a new idea causes me to have to make room for something else plot-wise, and odds are good that a story could have been edited for typos as recently as the day of its posting here, but the original version will likely be much older and fairly close to the publication date that I attach to it, if anyone's curious!

**“Dané Cashillé, Sixth Handmaiden in the Second Class for Padmé Amidala”**

 

 **01.) Famous:** Her mother and her aunt, Anicé and Roanna Cashillé, are famous (though perhaps infamous might also be a good description) on Naboo and all throughout the Mid Rim – oddly similar fraternal twins, identical in size and shape and features, but for the color of their eyes and the degree of curl to (or lack thereof) and color of their hair, daughters of a line that has produced monarchs of Naboo and Princesses and Governors of Theed off and on for the past two thousand years, highly intelligent and kind sisters extremely interested in the welfare of both the Nabooian people and that of the myriad various sentient species of the Galactic Republic, but so incredibly beautiful that they were sought out by many different kinds of artists to act as models and muses from such a young age that they became known first for their beauty and ability to inspire others rather than for their extensive efforts to help improve the lot not only of everyday Nabooians but also that of beings caught up in disasters and conflicts all over the known galaxy – and her elder sister, Silviana, has already helped seal a pact for a much closer relationship between Naboo and Grizmallt by marrying their young King Gryna Ullætto Nejanis, so it’s not so very surprising that she should want to be involved in politics, though her mother tries her damnedest to keep her out of it, given how ugly and cutthroat the political realm has been since Veruna’s second term as King began, only to run far past the date when law dictated that it should have ended.

 **02.) Misfortune:** The Princess of Theed is generally elected between the ages of nine and twelve, the Queen (or King) or Naboo between the ages of about fourteen and eighteen (at least for the first term), though there have of course been some exceptions (notably in the case of the last Queen and King who married or were wed while in office, Queen Madeva and King Vísudeva, or Lataré Madeva Najaffa, née Nabishu, and Aldron Najaffa, who were elected at twelve and a half and at twenty-three for their first terms and who essentially ruled together for two and a half of their four combined four-year terms): she just has the misfortune of having lost out to Padmé Naberrie for the position of Princess of Theed and to be too untried to put herself forward as a replacement for Veruna (and unfortunately not the young girl already being groomed by Padmé to replace her as Princess of Theed and therefore not in line to replace Padmé if she becomes Queen), even though she is of the proper age and knows that she would be an excellent Queen, having essentially been in (unofficial) training for it almost all of her life.

 **03.) Joke:** Yané is exactly two years and one month younger than she is: their mothers often used to laugh about how the younger of them has made up for her early tardiness by having her first two children earlier than her sister’s first two children (approximately four and a half years and two years earlier, respectively), but the joke soured somewhat for Dané after her young cousin chose to attach herself to Padmé Naberrie’s campaign to remove Veruna from the throne and so was invited (and accepted the offer) to become one of Padmé’s first handmaidens, after her election to the Nabooian throne, whereas Dané had to settle for applying to join the new Queen’s second handmaiden training class like a common petitioner begging for notice.

 **04.) Dishonor:** There’s no dishonor in being a handmaiden rather than a monarch (even if, she supposes, one is being a handmaiden to a Princess of Theed rather than to a monarch of Naboo, as Padmé has evidently persuaded her young replacement to agree in investing in, even though the Princess of Theed is traditionally not one of the two positions generally granted handmaidens or chosen companions) – in fact, historically speaking, frequently it is the bravest and most loyal handmaidens or chosen companions who tend to be immortalized in folklore and remembered fondly in popular stories and art, even more often than their specific monarchs or Senators – but it nonetheless burns her, at least a little, to have to settle for being a handmaiden when she’s always expected to be Queen, and so she plans on being the absolute best at what she does and to make herself over into a decoy (despite her red hair and green eyes) and become so good at being Queen Amidala that she will make Padmé ashamed of the fact that she is the one receiving all of the acknowledgment and credit for being such a good monarch when Dané is the one actually doing the dangerous and difficult work and effectively out-Queening the Queen in the process.

 **05.) Proud:** Every time Yané sees her, she frowns and mutters darkly about how Dané is too proud and takes far too much for granted and needs to seriously consider the fact that the right person may have very well actually been elected Queen after all; yet, it’s not until she goes in for a personal audience with Amidala and finally gets a chance to truly meet her (outside of a venue of public debate) and is quite literally rocked back onto her heels from the sheer unadulterated power of the Naberrie girl’s charismatic presence and obvious intelligence and caring that Dané truly understands what it is that Yané has been trying to tell her: so far as she knows, she is the first of many to refer to Padmé Amidala as a living flame of a woman, and, though this epithet might, on the surface, seem far more applicable to Dané, with her flaming red hair, since her meeting with the young Queen, she would be the first to insist that this description more fully and truly embodies Padmé than it could ever really fit her.

 **06.) Shame:** Dané’s shame burns her so deeply that, after leaving the Queen’s presence, she immediately vows to herself to amend her foolish, self-centered ways, and to become the very best handmaiden she possibly can – not out of any selfishly self-aggrandizing attempt to one-up Padmé, but instead simply to give the Queen the kind of due and proper service that she so manifestly deserves.

 **07.) Different:** It’s different, to have been raised in a position of power, expected (and personally anticipating) to rule one day or to at least take charge of one of the larger cities or provinces, and to have come to the Queen’s service due to either lack of better alternatives or else due to a mere interest in politics (with no real weight of familial expectation to govern), and so she has much more in common with handmaidens like Eirtaé and Yané; she tries very hard to avoid seeming to closet herself with her cousin and former acquaintances, though, having no wish to have to deal with perceptions or even charges of snobbery from the other trainees.

 **08.) Duty:** She wonders sometimes about the generally consistently quite high levels of Force-sensitivity among her people and whether or not they might perhaps be neglecting their duty to the rest of the galaxy by refusing to willingly send virtually any of their children at all to the Jedi for training as Knights and Masters, but the values of the Jedi Order are just too inherently wrong-headed for Nabooians to feel comfortable at the prospect of abandoning their children, thus, and so she usually ends up shrugging the whole thing off an unavoidable failure of compatibility, rather than as a lack of responsible behavior on the part of Nabooians.

 **09.) Program:** In the days when a Queen’s (or a Senator’s) handmaidens and a King’s (or a Senator’s) chosen companions were essentially religious acolytes devoted to a monarch (or to an elected galactic leader) who was quite literally regarded as an elected living avatar of the Great Lady, a strict training program was utilized, with training beginning as early as possible (even in infancy, in some cases) – with the earliest training stimulating sensory awareness through sound, color, texture, odor and taste, kinesics awareness through spinning, rocking, warmth, cold, and emotional awareness through fear, joy, anger, love, hate, and security; with rigorous year-round programs throughout childhood that were deliberately designed to broaden both cognition and physical ability while resisting all forms of specialization, so that mental and physical development could be pushed to the limits in all possible fields of study; with a strict and unforgiving disciplinary code to promote the goal that every potential acolyte be both completely self-directed and yet utterly able to obey orders given by higher authority no later than the age of thirteen, including construction and maintenance of living quarters and training facilities, sports that developed strategy as well as both leadership and obedience in addition to physical skill and dexterity (with some, like long-distance running, aiding the disciplinary code and the five-day-a-week curriculum in either producing a fully ready candidate for the novitiate or in washing an unsuitable trainee out of the program), and both the evening silence and the weekly fast, as tasks performed by the younger candidates and enforced by the elder, who punished breaches with a severity they had learned in their turn from their predecessors; and, in the final preparatory year, at about fourteen, with all remaining students (having already been thoroughly grounded in such subjects as propositional and predicate logic, inference, modal deduction, transfinite induction, statistics, multivalent analysis, conceptual synthesis, _n_ -dimensional geometry, formal linguistics, and transcendental phenomenology meant to provide the mental linkages necessary to accept subsequent training as acolytes, should the individual student succeed in mastering them and so prove worthy of pledging service to a sworn lord or lady) being tested in their ability to retain both related and unrelated information, with final tests involving such feats as absorbing a series of ten thousand items long random strings of combined letter and number sequences and duplicating them perfectly, down to the timing and spacing as the original, the recitation of entire books from memory, the replication of spatial configurations (such as the layout of a city after having seen the actual place or the plans for it only once), the combination, division, sorting, filing, and accurate retrieval of pieces of discrete information with ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine-eight-five percent accuracy per ten thousand items, the absolute recollection and perfect repetition of conversations word for word and gesture for gesture from start to finish, mimicking the cadence and vocal inflection and stance and shifting of weight and movements of each participant (up to and including ten different both human or nonhuman participants), and, finally, the successful extrapolation from given information to alternative explanations of the causes or the effects of that data, with at least a two-place ranking for the likelihood of the interpretations offered and the primary hypothesis never failing to be less than ninety-two to ninety-eight percent reliable as to the actual cause or outcome of any given set of events: then and only then, having successfully proven that they’d freed their reasoning from dependence on absolutes and that they possessed broad and accurate knowledge of at least ninety-five percent of everything occurring within the scope of their world and the ability to predict and extrapolate both the causal reasons behind and effects of said occurrences and were able to correct for the assumptions hidden in another’s inferences (being able to accurately see every sentient being as a set of behavior patterns ready to be orchestrated), were students finally pronounced ready to serve their sworn lord or lady in the conception and proposal of detailed alternate future pathways, courses of actions, and explanations of events, aiding in the planning and husbanding of economic, political, and military strategy by offering up various different courses of action and accurately inferring the most probable of all of the many dozens of possible consequences of pursuing, altering, combining, or disengaging any of these specific, myriad courses, helping to plan for the long run, negotiate delicate diplomatic matters, judge matters of life and death, and, in essence, serve as advisors and helpmeets to their Queen or King (or Senator), becoming beloved chosen companions and handmaidens to the elected avatar of the Great Goddess – and, though these methods seem perhaps overly harsh (especially compared to the way that most training is carried out now, at the Lady’s Temples), she can see traces of the same training at play in the raising of sons and daughters of Naboo for political and social service, especially in the backgrounds of people like Amidala and even herself, and it is her considered opinion that a return to the old ways would not be all that difficult and would also indubitably do their troubled and threatened planet a world of near-infinite good.

 **10.) Unreasonable:** The Trade Federation is being entirely unreasonable in its demands and not only can she not, for the life of her, understand what it is that its leaders think they’re going to accomplish or why or how (the majority of Naboo’s plasma trade is with the Galactic Republic’s government, after all, and that democratic government won’t be able to justify taking any kind of goods from a planet that’s undergone a violent, hostile, illegal takeover, as the Trade Federation seems to be threatening to do), she also can’t quite escape the nagging feeling that there’s some other party involved that’s orchestrating events towards some dark, mysterious purpose.

 **11.) Vindictive:** Before the Trade Federation’s invasion, she would not have said that she is a vindictive person – scrupulously just, perhaps, and unlikely to ever forget a wrong, though (usually) only for her own edification and warning, not to really hold against the other person – but then their planet is seized by force by greedy Neimoidians and some of their own turn traitor rather than have to relinquish power or risk their precious hides in fighting against the usurpers, and people start dying, friends and family both as well as innocent bystanders, and she finds her heart rapidly hardening against beings like the Trade Federation’s Viceroy and Rosé Ganesa.

 **12.) Conscience:** When she’s calm enough to consider the matter dispassionately, she’s fairly certain that the citizens of Naboo who can be turned against their Queen are those who are either heartless/soulless and utterly lacking in conscience (and so are not at all the kind of people they want on their fair planet, much less on their side in any conflict, anyway) or else those who have never met Padmé Amidala and so are being blackmailed or otherwise pressured (perhaps even tortured) into turning traitor (as otherwise she’s quite sure that the Queen’s sheer force of will and heart would forbid the turning of these individuals against her); however, unfortunately, not all the serenity in the world can convince her that handmaidens who willingly turn against their Queen are anything other than unforgivable blackguards or that she won’t rejoice to see each and every one of such foul traitors strung up to strangle to death slowly in a highly public forum, in accordance with the oldest letter of the law, whether others might deem her vindictively vengeful and blood-thirsty for desiring such an end for those treacherous, treasonous bitches or not!

 **13.) Girl:** There’s a girl Dané had wanted to convince to join the handmaiden program but unfortunately never really got past the point of suggesting it to, once, in passing, before the Trade Federation’s droid armies invaded and everything went to hell, so she’s shocked when, on one of their missions, they find someone there before them, efficiently robbing the Trade Federation of the supplies and creds her team had been planning to take, and even more shocked to realize, when that person has turned about and cheerfully demanded to know what’s been taking them so long, that it is none other than the self-same girl – Versé Rhisiart, someone she knows from the social circles her family moves in, though unfortunately her knowledge of Versé is not nearly as great as that of her older sister, Ansia Rhisiart, since Versé is a year younger than Dané is whereas her elder sister isn’t quite a year older than Dané is and, as she recalls, had been quite eager, when they first met, to be able to say that she was an ally and close acquaintance of one of the famous Cashillé children – grinning recklessly at Dané from over her shoulder and asking if she thinks this will qualify her for a position among the Queen’s next group of handmaidens, when she returns from Coruscant, or if she’s still going to need to put together a proper application packet after all of this is over and done with.

 **14.) Tick:** Shelanné Glenn is the most mysterious, infuriating, enchanting, maddening, charming, intoxicating, bewitching, desirable creature she’s ever known, and she would give a great deal to know what makes Shelanné tick and why it is that she can always seem to both motivate Dané immensely and yet keep her from doing anything rash that she might regret at a later date (with a more cool head), and it’s not until Versé Rhisiart – who’s wholeheartedly joined their resistance – laughingly refers to the fact that those we love always have immense powers over us that it even occurs to Dané that she’s in love with the blasted woman.

 **15.) Heart:** Dané wouldn’t have ever thought she’d find her own heart’s mate among the other handmaidens – she’s always been inclined to brief flings that are fun and entertaining and good for making friends and allies but otherwise essentially meaningless, and most of her excessive flirting has been with boys (they were _so_ very easy to discombobulate and to wrap around one’s fingers, after all!) – but then, to be honest, she hadn’t ever thought a lot of things would be the way they are now, so she probably shouldn’t be so surprised that the mate of her soul is a fellow handmaiden with doe-eyes and lovely hair like sable-in-sunlight by the name of Shelanné Glenn.

 **16.) Compare:** It’s the silliest thing, really: Shelanné thinks herself wild and wholly undignified (in her natural element), because she enjoys being out of doors and likes to be more active than some prefer, and so declares herself utterly bewildered by any and all attempts to compare her to the Queen’s primary decoy and best friend, Lady Sabé; yet, Shelanné’s enjoyment of the outdoors isn’t predicated on movement – she can sit silently in a pool of light for hours on end, meditating or reading, and be just as content as (if not more so than) if she’d been out hiking or swimming or riding – and she possesses such a sense of calm and tranquility that she projects steadiness and serenity upon others (including Dané!), promoting thought and deliberation and calmness in others in much the same way that Lady Sabé does, therefore accounting for the tendency of the other handmaidens to compare her to that formidable young woman, even if Sabé may seem less inclined to run about climbing trees or exhausting herself by swimming against the changing tides, as Shelanné is sometimes known to do. 

**17.) Sense:** Shelanné always seems to have a better sense for who might make good working partners (and perhaps even more, given time and room for feelings of friendship to deepen and ripen) than Dané does: despite the fact that Dané prides herself for her observational skills and is quite good with the management of people as either individuals or as a larger group, she simply has no head for relationships or match-making, so she often finds herself gently (and somewhat bemusedly) teasing her beloved about Shelanné’s tendency to play at matchmaker, finding it amusing that someone so level-headed could also be so good at and derive so much pleasure from helping individuals find their matches. 

**18.) Death:** She won’t kill the girl herself in cold blood (though Lady knows she deserves nothing less than death) and she won’t attempt to justify what would essentially be a vengeful killing for the death of one of her cousins (Rosé having been the one to suggest that it might be possible to break Yané Cashillé if her young brother were captured and brought in and tortured – an act that had resulted in Constanoin’s death), by trying to claim that she has the right, under law, to execute the traitor out of hand (even though she technically does have that right); she can and she _will_ gladly turn the _streppoch_ over to the mob screaming for her blood, though, and she can and will also absolutely _refuse_ to ever feel guilty about it, later on, given how unpredictable mobs can be (especially when their desires are thwarted) and how many individuals whose safety and well-being she is at least partially responsible for might have been injured by the mob’s wrath, if she were to try to deny its howling masses the traitor, and if the Queen wishes to attempt to try her for a war criminal, for this decision, later on, well, then just let her _try_ it!

 **19.) Good:** It’s a damned good thing that they took the Viceroy and those of his minions who actually (unfortunately!) survived the retaking of the Palace and the planet away quickly, once they’d been captured, because otherwise she knows that she would have figured out the locations they were being kept in and killed every last one of them, for the misery they so selfishly and casually inflicted on both her family and her people.

 **20.) Damaged:** Yané has obviously been . . . badly damaged, by her time under Lietté and Roché and Rosé and Essé’s “tender” care, and not just physically (if it were just a mater of physical wounds, they could easily heal her with a little bacta and perhaps a bit of surgery and be done with it, after all), and she is so furious about the fact that two of those _saidhín khiel-streppain_ escaped during the confusion as the Palace was retaken that she makes sure she fills out all the paperwork necessary for the government to legally issue a warrant for their arrests and their deaths, should they ever return to Nabooian space or surface on a planet (or elsewhere) with good extradition laws, even though she knows that Lietté and Roché are too clever by far to be all that likely to resurface anywhere they can be caught out and returned to Naboo for trial.

 **21.) Mob:** She tells Amidala quite frankly about how she gave Rosé over to the mob, and, though the Queen seems saddened (not exactly disappointed in her, mind, just . . . grieved, or perhaps aggrieved, that such a thing should have happened, on Naboo, and perhaps also that she cannot summon up enough distance from what Rosé was and did to feel proper horror for what happened to her), she doesn’t seem at all inclined to chastise or pass judgment on Dané, and, so far as she can tell, the only ill effect she suffers is a lack of immediate advancement (if indeed her lack of promotion to the position of primary decoy is due to the Queen’s dissatisfaction with her – and not the fact that Dormé is, quite simply, the better choice – which she honestly doubts, given how eerily like both Sabé and the Queen Dormé is), as she remains the Queen’s secondary decoy rather than advancing to the primary position when Sabé departs for the Galactic Senate.

 **22.) Beloved:** Shelanné, her beloved, tries hard to distract her from her fuming preoccupation with the traitors who escaped, pointing out that it will be more productive to seek to undo the wrongs that they did than to brood endlessly on the evil of them and how she would like to answer than evil with ill deeds of her own; yet, even though she knows that what her beloved says is only good sense, she finds it hard to focus on anything but what she’d like to do to those bloodless bitches when Yané is alternating between being a sobbing, raving mess and all but catatonic with remembered fear and pain, for Yané has always been both wiser and stronger than Dané, and it frankly kills her to see Yané in such a state. 

**23.) Pity:** She thinks it’s a pity that the young Jedi who slew the Sith and who so obviously captured both the Queen’s and her primary decoy’s hearts during their desperate attempt to reach Coruscant and report on the Trade Federation’s illegal activities regarding Naboo evidently is one of the few living Jedi who’s chosen the path of utter chastity, for she’s fairly sure that, otherwise, he could have been . . . ah, _persuaded_ to stay on Naboo, with Padmé and Sabé, and she is also quite certain that, if he had stayed, they would be in danger of suffering a lot fewer retaliatory attacks from the Trade Federation (and their ally, the probable still living second Sith, given that Master Yoda has insisted that there are _always_ two Sith), for Obi-Wan Kenobi surely would have seen to things even if he’d had to go chase down and execute both the second, mysterious Sith Lord and the Trade Federation’s Viceroy himself, to eradicate the danger against Amidala and those closest to her, like Sabé.

 **24.) Trust:** She doesn’t trust Palpatine, for to be perfectly frank it seems to her as if he’s done nothing but profit off of the misery of their people, and she does not hesitate to make her opinion on the matter known, or to make it equally clear that she thinks the Queen can do just fine on her own, with her loyal handmaidens to help her, and so doesn’t need to wait about on advice from their former Senator.

 **25.) Bad Feeling:** She has a bad feeling that something awful is going to happen from the moment that Amidala first announces she will make her state of the planet address live from the open square before Theed Palace, and she argues vehemently until she’s finally allowed to be the one who’ll give the speech, to protect the Queen against any possible threat (even though it technically should be Dormé’s job, if anyone is going to stand in for Padmé as Amidala), so she can’t claim to be very surprised when the crowds erupt with blaster fire and old-fashioned projectiles and first her left shoulder and then her midriff and upper left thigh explode with agony, though she is, wistfully, regretful to be proven right in such a way, especially as Shelanné sacrifices herself in a vain attempt to shield her already dying body . . .

**Author's Note:**

>  **Clarification Notes: 1.)** I ran out of room in my other notes section, but I feel it's probably important to clarify that I created the character of Dané Cashillé after learning of an Expanded Universe (EU) character by the name of Dané, who originally had neither a last name nor a backstory of any sort. She was a redheaded handmaiden-in-training at the time of the Trade Federation's invasion of Naboo, according to the EU game she appeared in, and that was all that was originally known about her. I gave her a last name (Cashillé) and a backstory in much the same way that I did for the canon handmaidens (i.e., the handmaidens who are present in the actual prequel films, who are also all designated by a sole, presumably first name in those movies), **long** before anyone got around to officially assigning anything like a backstory for her in the EU. My Dané Cashillé is therefore more than a little . . . different from the Dané character that now exists in the EU. I've contemplated creating another Dané character whose backstory is more compliant to that of the backstory that was eventually assigned to Dané in the EU, but haven't ever quite managed to convince myself it would be a good idea (and not simply cause even more confusion, given two handmaiden characters from TPM era with the same first name). Thus, for now, at least, readers can simply (safely) read my Dané Cashillé as a somewhat AU version of the Expanded Universe Dané! If that changes, I will let y'all know before I post anything involving a second Dané character more in line with the Dané who currently exists in the EU! **2.)** Since Dané in the EU isn't portrayed by a particular actress (I could be wrong about this, but I believe she only exists in the EU in a game of some sort), I have chosen to model my Dané Cashillé on an extremely redheaded (and naturally curly), very green-eyed version of Lena Katina. I have no idea what this singer sounds like in real life: I chose her because I saw a picture of her in a magazine at a doctor's office and the structure of her face reminded me vaguely of Natalie Portman. I had just found out that there was a redheaded handmaiden-in-training during the time of TPM named Dané in the EU and was trying to mentally cast her at the time, and thus my Dané was basically born. **3.)** One of the reasons why my AU **Star Wars** series _**You Became to Me**_ is so entirely not even nearly complete has to do with the fact that I really started writing at the wrong end of the prequel trilogy for an AU (in my defense, though, when I started what became my _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ trio, which is over a million words long, I thought I was doing a sort of one-shot fix-it based on an idea I got for "fixing" RotS by changing something that happens very near the end of James Luceno's EU novel _Labyrinth of Evil_ , which is set immediately prior to RotS). One of these days, I fully intend to rectify that problem by going back and starting from the beginning, with an AU rewrite of TPM, which is why I took the time to do a character study sketch for a supporting character like Dané. She'll be showing up again, in a more prominent role, whenever I get around to that AU rewrite of TPM. Folks might want to keep that in mind when reading this, since technically this is spoilerish for an AU novel that I haven't gotten around to writing yet!


End file.
